The present invention is directed to an order fulfillment system and method and, in particular, to a goods-to-robot picking system.
Order fulfillment of orders placed over the Internet must take place within a relatively short period of time in order to be commercially competitive. The same could be said for orders received by phone, facsimile or by the mail based on catalog or television-based merchandizing. Such order fulfillment is known as E-commerce and places demands on an order fulfillment system to meet such Obligations. This is compounded by the fact that E-commerce usually involves a large number of small orders (each containing as few as one item in the order) that are selected from a large number of potential items. Each unique item has a specific inventory identification, known in the industry as a stock-keeping unit (SKU). Each item usually bears an optical code, such as a bar code or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag that identifies the SKU of the item. Order fulfillment has utilized a goods-to-person system in which a computer system retrieves donor receptacles, also known as inventory receptacles or product receptacles, from an inventory buffer, such as an automated warehouse. The donor receptacles are delivered to a goods-to-person station. The computer system instructs the operator to remove one or more items from a donor receptacle and deposit the item(s) to one or more recipient receptacles, also known as order receptacles, customer receptacles, or the like.
Goods-to-robot order fulfillment systems have to be proposed in order to replace the human operator. However, such systems have not been satisfactory.